Upgrade Blake Crouch Quotes

What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there's no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight.

We don’t have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem. That, more than any other single factor, is what’s driving us toward extinction.

I suspect that, if we all had perfect memory, we would all grieve the older versions of we used to be the way we grieve departed friends.

Maybe compassion and empathy are just squishy emotions. Illusions created by our mirror neurons. But does it really matter where they come from? They make us human. They might be what make us worth saving.

I had extraordinary dreams, and an ordinary mind.

You can’t kill humanity to save humanity. Human beings are not a means to an end.

No one teaches you how to handle the death of a dream.

Higher intelligence doesn't make you less greedy or self-centered or evil. It doesn't necessarily make you a good person.

We lived in a veritable surveillance state, engaged with screens more than with our loved ones, and the algorithms knew us better than we knew ourselves.

Doesn’t feel like intelligence itself is the answer. It terrifies me to think of a world where we have all the same problems, a billion less friends, and everyone thinks they’re smart enough to be infallible.

I suspect that, if we all had perfect memory, we would all grieve the older versions of who we used to be the way we grieve departed friends.

What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there’s no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight.

You’re working off a flawed assumption. Higher intelligence doesn’t make you less greedy or self-centered or evil. It doesn’t necessarily make you a good person.

It is a supremely cruel thing to have your mind conjure a desire which it is functionally unable to realize. No one teaches you how to handle the death of a dream.

Never before had I seen Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers. Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning

Being smart doesn't make people infallible, it just makes them more dangerous.

All the existential threats to our existence live under the umbrella of climate change.

The greatest threat to our species lies within us.

Hunger, disease, war, warming- these threats loom over us like building storm clouds. But ninety-nine percent of humanity reads about our crumbling world in the morning headlines, then ignores it and gets on with their day.

Human nature will be the last part of nature to surrender to man.- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

It is a supremely cruel thing to have your mind conjure a desire which it is functionally unable to realize.

So you’re saying people are too stupid?” Basri asked. “Not just that,” Miriam said. “It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done.

If there’s a solution, it has to lie in reaching us from our ambivalence. Our apathy.

It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.

If I lose the ability to hurt, I also lose my grasp on joy—those brief moments of contentment that make consciousness worth the voyage.

What if you create a bunch of people who are just drastically better at what they already were. Soldiers. Criminals. Politicians. Capitalists.

But I didn’t live in a world where any of my dreams were possible anymore.

Life never really goes the way you want or expect. Usually, even getting exactly what you want turns out not to have been what you really wanted. So, my son, if you ever find a sliver of happiness and peace, just be thankful and live. Don’t reach for more, because a sliver is more than most people ever find.

People with those kinds of ambitions—they aren’t like the rest of us. There’s a relentlessness in them. They think they want peace. They think achievement will bring it to them. It never does.

We were a bunch of primates who had gotten together and, against all odds, built a wondrous civilization. But paradoxically—tragically—our creation’s complexity had now far outstripped our brains’ ability to manage it.

Feelings are also the core of compassion and empathy. We’re becoming capable of rationalizing anything. Maybe sentiment helps with the checks and balances.

There’s no one else on this planet I would rather have ten thousand dinners with.

If nothing changes, we will die off for the stupidest reason imaginable—because we refused, for so many childish reasons, to do the obvious things that would save us.

Finally understood that free will did not exist, because I could not choose my desires, only whether to pursue them.

If I lose the ability to (feel) hurt, I also lose my grasp on joy -- those brief moments of contentment that make consciousness worth the voyage.

But I didn’t live in a world where any of my dreams were possible anymore. And the hardest truth — the one that had been eating me slowly for most of my adult life — was that even if it was, I didn’t possess a fraction of the raw intelligence of an Anthony Romero or Miriam Ramsay. I had extraordinary dreams and an ordinary mind.

I could not choose my desires, only whether to pursue them.

Put simply: Our situation was fucked, and we weren’t doing enough to un-fuck it.

To save humanity, I needed my humanity.

The absence of sensory gating is a key marker for schizophrenia, and actually contributes to making people go insane. An existence without gating would be torture.

our creation’s complexity had now far outstripped our brains’ ability to manage it.

Mostly, I just sit by the kitchen window, watching the sea change.

We had gotten so much right. And too much wrong. The future was here, and it was a fucking mess.

The stakes were the future of our species. Where we were going. What we would become. Kara had started the Gene War.

otherworldly buttes

Maybe compassion and empathy are just squishy emotions. Illusions created by our mirror neurons. But does it really matter where they come from? They make us human. They might even be what make us worth saving.

You can stop splitting the atom; you can stop visiting the Moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life. —Erwin Chargaff

We were a monstrous, thoughtful, selfish, sensitive, fearful, ambitious, loving, hateful, hopeful species. We contained within us the potential for great evil, but also for great good. And we were capable of so much more than this.

Life never really goes the way you want or expect. Usually, even getting exactly what you want turns out not to have been what you really wanted. So, my son, if you ever find a sliver of happiness and peace, just be thankful and live.

Poverty, disease, starvation, and all the hatred those hardships breed, growing worse every decade—as we squeeze the last drops from our planet’s resources. We can’t keep living in denial about what’s happening or hoping that it’s someone else’s problem to solve.

Never before had I seen Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers. Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.

And I was struck, again, as an outside observer, by how much the members of our species needed one another. All these people are out in the cold rain. To Laugh and drink. To talk about nothing. It was almost as if that need for connection and touch was our... their.. lifeblood.

We walked back to the hotel under a deep navy sky bejeweled with stars. In the center of the plaza a choir was singing. They held quivering candles, and their voices lilted icily into the sky. I didn't see the moment. Not really. I saw the story behind the moment - a tale passed down over two thousand years that told of a child of a superbeing sent to save the world. Never before had I seen Homo Sapiens so clearly - a species, at its most fundamental level, of story tellers. Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometimes brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.

palimpsest

I know you’re trying to do the right thing, but you can’t put this knowledge back into the box.

Three nights later, I had wild dreams—like my brain had been infected by Salvador Dalí on mushrooms.

But my sister was right about one thing—we will die out in the next century if nothing changes. And I think I discovered why our species seems so willing to let this happen. One child dies in a well, the world watches and weeps. But as the number of victims increases, our compassion tends to diminish.

My mother once posited that we are not rational beings. We read about all the looming threats in the paper, we watch it on the news, and then we get on with our day. And, yes, some of that is thanks to our ability to hide from reality with denial, with cognitive dissonance, with magical thinking. But she forgot the most important thing: In the absence of compassion, selfishness is the most rational response of all. Our species’ superpower is not caring. We merely exercised that ability.

Humans are 99.9 percent identical in their haploid DNA/genome sequence of approximately 3.2 billion base pairs. However, while we all have roughly the same genes, there are polymorphisms—small differences in the sequence of these genes—that lead to changes in expression levels, and even alter a gene’s function.

Miriam said. “It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.” I finished my shower,

Helena.

Lexus

Our ability to read out this sequence of our own genome has the makings of a philosophical paradox. Can an intelligent being comprehend the instructions to make itself

scope insensitivity—the notion that humans are bad at distinguishing between two hundred dead and two million.

Cognitive biases had to be factored into the labyrinthine equation: scope insensitivity—the notion that humans are bad at distinguishing between two hundred dead and two million.

It scares me because I’m afraid of losing the ability to feel things deeply.

Feelings are also the core of compassion and empathy.

Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.

Douglas Hofstadter.

free will did not exist, because I could not choose my desires, only whether to pursue them.

The Porsche was one of the new “throwback” extended-range electrics with a quad-motor chassis that could do 0 to 60 in .9 seconds and had a range of 1,000 miles on full charge.

In the twenty-first century, the third big project of humankind will be to acquire for us divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus. —Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus

Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have “taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho” and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it? —C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

The genes that steered us toward sentiment and its downstream belief patterns are still present in our genome

For every one hundred people in the United States, there were 48.7 surveillance cameras, and behind them a government network of AI-driven facial-recognition search engines, paired with deeply eroded privacy laws.

There were no more glaciers in Glacier National Park.

Before all this, I was as happy as I’d ever been. I lived in a cabin I had built at seven thousand feet in the mountains above Butte. I skied in the winter. Fly-fished in the summer. Hunted in the fall. You’ve been there.

If a person’s genetic code were written into a standard-size book, that book would be a twenty-story tome consisting of three billion permutations of the letters A, C, G, and T, which represent the four nucleobases—adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. The specific arrangement of these four nucleobases creates the code for all biological life on the planet. This code is the genotype, and the way it physically expresses in a life-form (eye color, for instance), combined with its interactions with the environment, is called the phenotype. But understanding the correlation between genotype and phenotype—which DNA code programs which traits—still largely eludes us.

I’d been infected, not only with a virus of unknown origin, but with a payload encoding the most powerful genome-modifying system ever created. Almost certainly it had been designed, not to make me sick, but to infect some or all of the cells in my body, potentially editing and rewriting portions of my DNA.

The far-ranging latitude granted by the Gene Protection Act made it legal for the GPA to use people’s voter registration information, phone records, CCTV surveillance tracking, publications, travel history, census forms, Social Security documents, tax returns, and every keystroke they made, all in the scope of what had been coined Predictive Criminality Modeling.

The far-ranging latitude granted by the Gene Protection Act made it legal for the GPA to use people’s voter registration information, phone records, CCTV surveillance tracking, publications, travel history, census forms, Social Security documents, tax returns, and every keystroke they made, all in the scope of what had been coined Predictive Criminality Modeling. And all without a warrant or just cause.

I was scrolling through page after page of my genome analysis—three billion letters—and the mysteriousness of the moment was undeniable: I was a conscious being reading the instructions for my own creation.

We don't have an intelligence problem, we have a compassion problem

Our species’ superpower is not caring. We merely exercised that ability. We don’t have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem. That, more than any other single factor, is what’s driving us toward extinction.

Our ability to read out this sequence of our own genome has the makings of a philosophical paradox. Can an intelligent being comprehend the instructions to make itself? —John Sulston

Mom is rarely nostalgic, but tonight proves an exception. She asks about my favorite moments growing up here. She even shares some of hers. And then she tells me something that even my average mind didn’t let me forget: “Life never really goes the way you want or expect. Usually, even getting exactly what you want turns out not to have been what you really wanted. So, my son, if you ever find a sliver of happiness and peace, just be thankful and live. Don’t reach for more, because a sliver is more than most people ever find.

We were a monstrous, thoughtful, selfish, sensitive, fearful, ambitious, loving, hateful, hopeful species. We contained within us the potential for great evil, but also for great good. And we were capable of so much more than this. My sister had been right about one thing: I couldn’t do nothing.

We were a bunch of primates who had gotten together and, against all odds, built a wondrous civilization. But paradoxically- tragically- our creation's complexity had now far outstripped our brains' ability to manage it.

You could almost feel the fear in the air—a living thing. These poor people. They must have been scared out of their minds, wondering what psychotic twist of fate had brought this disease into their midst.

And I was struck again with the awareness that I was alive in strange times. There was a palpable sense of things in decline.

I had extraordinary dreams and an ordinary mind.

...the light of my lonely summer evenings stretched past ten o'clock, the water like glass until a fish leaped and the sun lingering, lingering- a guest who wouldn't leave.

I wondered who I had become. What I had become. I wept. I screamed. I laughed hysterically. I clawed at my skin and ripped out my hair. I wanted to die. I wanted to live forever.

What allows human beings to concentrate on things amid the maelstrom of infinite stimuli is a neurological process called sensory gating. It filters out low-relevance (redundant or unnecessary) stimuli in the brain from all possible environmental stimuli. If this didn’t happen, we would experience an overload of irrelevant information in the higher cortical centers.

Can an intelligent being comprehend the instructions to make itself?

Money held no interest for me beyond the freedom it provided.

I thought I was a woman in search of peace in a place of my own.

So I bought some clothes at a thrift store, cleaned myself up,

$432 to my name.

I was broke. Homeless. Badly injured. Wanted.